This week I went to a talk at the GC on bigotry in science fiction publishing, and one of the presenters, Andre Carrington, looked at the way in which those fighting against diversity in science fiction today talk about it as a politicization and corruption of a previously “pure” form. As part of his response, he was looking at the ways in which American science fiction has historically been preoccupied with race from its earliest iterations, and one of the storylines he looked at in that part of his talk was that of John Carter, a character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I’m attaching here an illustration from one of the early stories, “John Carter and the Giant of Mars,” held in the Heron Collection of Speculative Fiction at Virginia Polytech and digitized as part of their Electronic Exhibition Series “Life on Mars.”